Posts: 530
Tue 02 Feb, 2010 12:56 pm
Late Iron Age Balt weapons
Reading through the thread about Germanic Iron Age weapons I decided to turn the atention towards some of the varieties of weapons used by Balt tribes in Late Iron Age ( 9th to 13th centuries AD) that seem to be unique for the time and area. One of such is the single-bladed swords with antenae-styled crossbars. As V. Kazakevicius states in his research devoted to the swords of the area, this appears to be a purely local form, only found in the territory of moern day Lithuania and Latvia. They have no pommels, only upper and lower crossbars. Tota of 11 such swords have been discovered so far and all are dated to the period of late 10th century and 11th century AD.
So, long storry short, I decided to make a replica of one of those blades, using a blade from Palanga (Lithuania) and the work on sword was finished earlier today, now I will start work on the scabbard for it. Despite beeing of quite obviously a cutting sword, it feels rather light in hand and moves swiftly, weighting less than 1 kg - when i started work I expected that it would weight more since it is nearly 5 mm thick in the spine and more than 3 cm wide in widest point. Sorry for poor quality of the picture, but I had to take the shot through the glass - as stright as I finished the work on blade, it had to go into handicraft exibiton :)
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